Trackmania Turbo review

What’s the most hardcore PC driving game? You might be surprised by one very credible answer. You can spend hours perfecting set-ups on iRacing, or erecting three screens and a fully pneumatic D-Box rig for a tricked-out Project Cars experience, but nothing compares to the steel-edged challenge of Trackmania, a driving game with its own cruel rhythm: race, reset and repeat until you’ve spent whole angry hours in the pursuit of shaving a few tenths of a second off a 20 second run.

It’s enough to cast Trackmania in an all-new light, filling in a line between Nadeo’s series and classics such as F-Zero and the racing output of AM2 that, it turns out, was always there. Only now it’s more explicit in the impossible moments of flight, the rude cambers and the tracks that corkscrew out of control. All of which is not to say that what made Trackmania sing in the first place has been forgotten. It’s still there in abundance – something you’ll find is true when butting up against the severe challenge of later tracks.

Trackmania’s a hard game, reaching the same levels of difficulty as its blood brother Trials in half the time. It can be off-puttingly brutal – the sensitivity of control required can be excessive (the d-pad’s the way to go, a facet that’ll be counter-intuitive to players so used to analogue control), as can the patience necessary for the latter challenges, and Nadeo’s done itself no favours by sticking to a rusty unlock system in the campaign that’s needlessly restrictive.

Elsewhere, though, this sings. It’s a gleeful celebration of one of the finest racing series around, packaged with care and a new-found sense of style. Trackmania Turbo is so convincing on console it doesn’t really feel like a belated port of a PC great. Instead, it feels more like a homecoming.